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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 29 Aug 2017, 23:15
by Chrissie777
John Pickup wrote:I had a letter from Malcolm Saville but sadly, I can't find it, I think my mother had it and it was lost.
I first read Treasure At The Mill in the early 60s, I still have the Armada paperback. I'm sure I saw the film version but I can't remember a thing about it!
John, if you watched other CFF movies from the 1940's and 1950's, it's certainly among the very best together with FOATI, "The Secret Tunnel" (1947) , "The Carringford School Mystery" and "Five Clues to Fortune" (which was filmed at Woburn Abbey).

That's really too bad about the Saville letter.
I still have a postcard from Astrid Lindgren on which she wrote to me where the old Kalle Blomkvist movies were filmed in Sweden. And a letter from gothic novels author Victoria Holt from the early 1980's.

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 30 Aug 2017, 09:46
by Anita Bensoussane
Chrissie777 wrote:Anita, what I like about Saville's book [Treasure at the Mill] (other than the really good plot) are the illustrations throughout the book and in the front before chapter 1 where you can see all details of the mill interior.
I'm afraid I don't remember whether my paperback copy has those illustrations, Chrissie. I'll take note next time I read the book. It's on the back row of a double row of books and the bookcase has boxes and a table right in front of it, so it's not easily accessible!

Thanks for the details of the CFF films. I'd like to watch them one of these days.

When people talk of Treasure at the Mill and Trouble at Townsend it makes me think of the English expression "Trouble at' mill" (generally said in a Northern accent), which people sometimes say when a problem has sprung up.

What non-Blyton book have you recently bought?

Posted: 08 Feb 2019, 07:06
by GloomyGraham
Split from another topic.

I just bought (and read today) 'Home to Witchend' the final (20th) book of Malcom Saville's 'Lone Pine' series. I've had the rest of the series for 40 years now, but missed this one (I don't think it had a big print run) when it was first published in 1978.

It's a reunion of the entire club (they don't often all come together) versus their old enemy 'The Ballinger' and her gang of criminals who have rented the house at Appledore, near Witchend, where the first (nazi spy) villains of the original book 'Mystery At Witchend' (1943) resided.

It ticks all the boxes for a finale with various guest stars from other books also making an appearance along with reminisces of previous adventures.

This book, like some of the other final stories, gets rather romantic as the two oldest members of the club becoming engaged at the end of the adventure. I like the fact that Saville ages up the characters a little throughout the series even though the twins' dog 'Mackie' is now old and not as active as he once was.

A bit thinner than some of the other tales in the series but nice to have completed my set after all these years.

Re: What non-Blyton book have you recently bought?

Posted: 08 Feb 2019, 09:26
by Boatbuilder
It must be quite satisfying to have finally completed your collection after all that time. Well done, Graham.

Re: What non-Blyton book have you recently bought?

Posted: 08 Feb 2019, 09:34
by timv
I read 'Home to Witchend' in the late 1980s reprint edition as an adult, having missed out on the last few Lone Pine books earlier as they were not written until after I'd read the Armada editions in the early 1970s. (This one came out in 1979, I think.) The book seemed a bit more 'deliberately structured' than earlier MS adventures in bringing in all the major and a lot of the minor characters, even some of the 'friends and helpers' and detectives from earlier books who'd only appeared once, but none the worse for that and it was nice to see them all again. The plot was believable and characters were still developing with twists that you could see foreshadowed in earlier books, eg Val outsmarting her manipulative 'aunt' Miss Ballinger and the subsidiary villain 'Slinky' Grandon doing so too.

It was a clever touch by MS (who was well into his 70s by this point, much older than Enid or Arthur Ransome were when they gave up writing) to do a version of the 1960s-70s TV show 'This Is Your Life' as the finale here. (In the show, Eamonn Andrews ambushed a celebrity and took them to a studio for a reunion with their distant family and old acquaintances). In this case, we had David doing it for Peter/ Petronella for her birthday and assorted characters from past Lone Pine stories turning up. Malcolm Saville, more fully than Enid, also regularly updated his settings and cultural references to fit each book in with its time of publication - thus in the later 1960s and early 1970s LP books we have a greater emphasis by the crooks on using guns, a friendly Dartmoor journalist (Dan Sturt, name presumably taken from the song 'Widecombe Fair') joining a TV news programme, Peter turning up to a coffee bar in Rye in a miniskirt, and would-be scientist Jon going to the new University of Sussex!

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 08 Feb 2019, 09:38
by Anita Bensoussane
Well done on completing your collection, Graham, though I must admit I don't like Home to Witchend as the reunion of all the characters feels somewhat contrived and the adventure is swamped by romance and nostalgia.

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 09 Feb 2019, 22:16
by GloomyGraham
Thanks everyone. Yes, it was nice to complete the set (at a cheap cost lol). I will have to re-read the whole series one of these days.

Though it certainly was nowhere near as good as most of the rest of the series, I think it was a better read than (say) 'Five are Together Again' as a series finale. Would have much preferred if Penny/Jon, Tom/Jenny & Harriet had come up to Witchend a little earlier though and had some part to play in 'solving the mystery'.

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 09 Feb 2019, 22:46
by Anita Bensoussane
Yes, I agree that Home to Witchend is better than Five Are Together Again and also better than Five Have a Mystery to Solve and Fun for the Secret Seven, all of which are poorly structured and contain glaring errors. Sadly, Enid Blyton had dementia by the time she wrote those books and her mind was no longer sharp. Home to Witchend suffers from sentimentality and from being overloaded with characters just for the sake of bringing everyone together for the final volume but it's still a coherent story.

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 10 Feb 2019, 09:44
by timv
I was a bit disappointed that Malcolm Saville didn't make more of the Sussex end of the story in 'Home to Witchend'. We have Penny at Rye being told by the local police detective that someone is passing fake banknotes around, but she and John never get to investigate this (as would be normal for other MS books) and instead the investigation is swiftly moved on to Shropshire where the twins do the chasing up.Possibly MS wanted to get the story on to the twins, but I got the impression of a 'loose end' left dangling in a hurried plot.

The romantic reminiscences and engagement of David (who I always thought a bit stolid and less interesting than Jon or Tom) and Peter at the end is a bit awkward, but at least MS did try to touch on teen romance for older readers and show characters feeling 'special' about each other which was unusual for that era. This was better done in his earlier coverage of David and Peter in 'Not Scarlet But Gold' where they are trapped in a mine roof-fall and for Jon and Penny in 'Treasure at Amorys' (where Penny gets trapped by reeds while swimming in a canal and Jon pulls her out). So possibly the awkward moments in Home to Witchend reflect his advancing age as well as the lack of genuine dramatic tension until the finale when David gets in danger.

Enid's only moment of semi-romance (daring for her) is I think in 'Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm', written in the late 1940s, where she has Melisande, aged 15?, flattered by the attentions of a handsome senior boy at her cousin Jack's (grammar) school who gives her a lift home from the local shops on his horse. He then comes to visit the farm and she shows him around - and his interest in her annoys her untidy cousin Jane, who had been hoping to show off her horses to him but who finds he ignores her as too 'messy' and 'unfeminine'. This then stimulates Jane to be more well-groomed and tidy; it's pride as much as a desire to win male attention but it's still very unusual for Enid to mention girls attracting boys at all .

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 10 Feb 2019, 14:50
by Rob Houghton
Yes - I would cite Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm as the only EB book that goes anywhere near to touching on a romantic episode, nd as you say, its all very sketchy and Enid just skates around the edges, but its very daring of her!

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 10 Feb 2019, 15:43
by Courtenay
Rob Houghton wrote:Yes - I would cite Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm as the only EB book that goes anywhere near to touching on a romantic episode...
What about Tales of Toyland?? :wink: :wink:

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 11 Feb 2019, 02:01
by Rob Houghton
Ah yes! I forgot that one! definitely a romance!

What other author are you reading at the moment?

Posted: 22 Nov 2019, 09:00
by Kate Mary
(Split from another topic.)

Girls Gone By have recently published Redshank's Warning by Malcolm Saville, the first title in the Jilliies series. I read some of the Jillies books in Armada editions many years ago but I don't think I have ever read this book before. It's a jolly good read.

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 22 Nov 2019, 22:00
by Anita Bensoussane
I have the Armada paperback versions of the Jillies books and I'm not sure whether or not they're abridged. Does anyone know? If they are, I might well consider collecting the Girls Gone By editions as Girls Gone By always go back to the original text.

Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Posted: 23 Nov 2019, 07:33
by Kate Mary
In the publishing history of my GGB copy it doesn't say if the Armada edition is abridged or not but it does mention that neither of the Armada editions include Malcolm Saville's explanatory foreword. The page count in my copy is 224, more than an Armada, but the story doesn't start until page 41.